The Trust Is Broken.

The good news first, because it is real. On September 8, the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners voted 4–0 to decommission the Flock automated license plate readers — twenty Falcon cameras that photograph every passing car. On September 9, the County’s Chief Financial Officer, Eric Credle, put it in writing to Flock, asking for a $53,571.43 refund for the unused portion of the contract. After the vote, the Sheriff’s Office disabled national data sharing, cut employee access, and notified the SBI. Thousands of you signed, spoke, and wrote to make that happen. It worked.

Now read the rest of the sentence. Credle’s letter tells Flock the termination covers the plate readers only — and then, in the County’s own words, “no changes to the Condor cameras portion of the contract.”

Follow the money, and the split is the tell

The County broke down a $100,000 invoice for Port City Daily: $40,000 of it went to the Condor cameras, $60,000 to the plate readers. The Condors were never an afterthought. They were nearly half the spend — and they are the half still running.

We wrote the Board to name the problem plainly

In a September 14 letter to the commissioners — on behalf of the 3,965 residents who have signed our petition — we credited their vote and then asked them to square it with the contract: “A party may amend a contract to remove part of what it covers, and it may cancel a contract in its entirety. We contend the County cannot do both at once: you cannot ‘cancel’ a contract while continuing to perform the rest of it. A ‘cancellation’ that leaves the Condor cameras running is not a cancellation — it is an amendment that keeps Flock in New Hanover County under a narrower description.” Read the full letter (PDF).

The Sheriff’s Office can’t keep its story straight

On September 8, the office told WWAY it was ending its access to the Flock camera system — disabling national data-sharing and removing employee access to searches. One week later, its spokesperson, Lt. Jerry Brewer, told Port City Daily the office “will continue using Condor cameras for video.” Read together, the message narrowed: what was announced as ending Flock became ending the plate readers, while the Condor cameras — which run on Flock’s own platform — stay. Brewer went further, saying the Flock system has helped in “multiple dozens” of arrests and that pulling the plate readers will have a “significant” impact on operations. That is not the language of an agency that considers its Flock program finished. It is the gap our letter asked the Board to close: is New Hanover done with Flock, or has it kept the cameras that watch people and simply stopped saying so?

This is a pattern, not a slip

Every fact the public has about this program, it had to pry loose. The Sheriff’s Office described the system to the community as license plate readers — cameras that read “the rear of vehicles only”. That was not the whole truth. The same $219,000 contract bought eight live-video Condors that pan, tilt, zoom, and can lock onto and follow a person — watch what one of these cameras can actually do — and they were never publicly announced. We had to point that out. Only after Commissioner Stephanie Walker pressed the question did the office confirm the Condors and their person-search capability. Then, on September 8, the office told WWAY it was ending its access to the Flock camera system. Now it says it will keep the Condors. Each step, residents learned the truth only by forcing it — and each step, the story changed. That is how public trust erodes: not in a single lie, but in a pattern of admissions dragged out one records request at a time.

And the one record that would answer the public’s most basic question, the Sheriff’s Office still won’t hand over straight. Nearly three million searches — 2,980,082 of them — ran through New Hanover’s cameras, and when the County produced the audit, it redacted the searching-agency name. Residents still cannot see who searched them, or why — the one field six peer agencies released in days.

And the Condors aren’t even permitted

Here is what should trouble the commissioners most about keeping them. Several of these live-video cameras sit in the state right-of-way — and Flock never obtained the NCDOT encroachment agreements the law requires. NCDOT said so in writing, and named the consequence itself: a device placed in the right-of-way without approval “may be in violation of GS 136-18(10).” We asked the Department to enforce it. Sit with the double standard. A homeowner cannot put up a shed, a fence, or a driveway in the public right-of-way without a permit and an inspection. A private surveillance company mounted pan-tilt-zoom cameras there with neither — and the County is now choosing to leave them running. If the rest of us cannot build without a permit, why can Flock?

Where the commissioners stand

Commissioner Stephanie Walker confirmed to Port City Daily that residents are confused, that there has been “a misconception the whole contract was canceled,” and that while she stands by her vote to pull the plate readers, she remains “open to continuing discussions about Condors.” That is a door worth walking through. The other three — Vice Chair Dane Scalise, Rob Zapple, and Bill Rivenbark — did not respond when the paper asked whether they will take up the Condor cameras. Chair LeAnn Pierce was unavailable. Four votes ended the plate readers. It will take a public answer from the same board to finish the job.

Meanwhile, the Condors are still being found — one at a time, from the sidewalk

The County still won’t say where the eight are. Residents have now located seven of them from public view, including one lowered and pointed at the youth soccer fields at Veterans Park, and two at Ogden Park. One remains unaccounted for.

What’s left to do

The refund letter is a milestone, not the finish line. The plate readers are coming down; the video cameras that can watch a child on a soccer field are not — yet. Ask the Board, on the record, to do one of two things: confirm the vote canceled the whole Flock contract, Condors included, or state plainly that it was an amendment and put the Condors on a public agenda.

Public trust is the thing law enforcement is supposed to build. On this program, the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office has done the opposite — each disclosure forced, each answer revised, the record of who searched still redacted. It can begin to repair that the same way trust is always repaired: by telling the public the whole truth, on the record, before it has to be pried loose.

We encourage everyone to write to the New Hanover County Commissioners now, at nhccommissioners@nhcgov.com, and ask them to end Flock — Condors included — once and for all.

Sign the petition   Email the Board   New Hanover County: the full record

Sources: Port City Daily, “County asks Flock for $53K ALPR refund, still on hook for Condor cameras” (Sept. 15, 2026); New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office statement to WWAY (Sept. 8, 2026); New Hanover County CFO letter to Flock Group Inc. (Sept. 9, 2026); DeFlockILM letter to the Board of Commissioners (Sept. 14, 2026).